Willa Hinshaw is the new associate pastor at First United Methodist Church in Liverpool, North Carolina. She’s expecting that her job will involve sermons, Bible study sessions, and counseling. She’s not expecting kidnapping and murders, but that’s just what she encounters in this, the first novel in the Reverend Willa Hinshaw Mysteries series.

Lee Ann Poole, a lovely young woman from one of the town’s best families, is someone who Willa has meet only briefly after a church service. Despite that, Willa is called in by her boss, the Reverend Philip Gallaway, to deal with the crisis when Lee Ann elopes on her wedding day, leaving her parents and her fiance bewildered. Willa handles the immediate crisis beautifully–sending the flowers to a nursing home, the fancy food to a soup kitchen, and turning away the wedding guests in a dignified manner. At home that night, Willa is exhausted and more than a little shocked when Lee Ann calls in a panic, saying she is in danger and begging Willa to come to Statesville to get her. Soon Willa is deep into the mystery of Lee Ann’s disappearance–consoling her mother, gently questioning the young man’s family, working with the retired policeman who is investigating the case. Eventually Willa herself is in danger as the kidnapper spins a web of deceit and murder.